Over the past two decades, we’ve seen just about every Harry Potter spin or parody imaginable, but this latest, comprehensive edit of Sorcerer’s Stone takes the gambit.
Granted, the idea of replacing wands—the ubiquitous tool and weapon of choice for wizards and witches in Harry Potter’s world—with guns isn’t exactly a novel idea; the person behind Harry Potter and the Deathly Weapon acknowledges as much in an artist statement but adds that he didn’t know of other versions existing before starting on his version. But The Deathly Weapon takes it up a notch by editing the entirety of Sorcerer’s Stone so that practically any time a wand is being used (and sometimes not just wands), a gun replaces it. The end result is a lot more bloodshed—even in a film that kicks off with an off-screen double-murder and attempted murder of a baby.
Even in the trailer itself, guns are tested out, used to break glass, as a distraction, stop massive plants, and even to get people out of the way. A full version is available to view on the parody film’s website.
The person behind the gun edit of Sorcerer’s Stone describes it as a “feature-length parody joke Hollywood movie that took roughly 5 years to finish” and includes more than 175 new special effects. While he points out—in anticipation of people asking him why—that nothing is sacred and that remixing is all part of the life of a piece of media. But it’s also as much of a commentary on Hollywood’s obsession with guns and how the depiction of guns in TV and film are often more focused on how cool it looks over its primary and deadly function.
“Though this project started as a tasteless joke, in the wake of mass shootings and other daily horrors, we have to ask ourselves if Hollywood pushes guns too hard,” the site’s statement reads. “If gun owners in our society really value guns for their use, or just for their sexiness…But at the end of the day, sexy or not, a gun is a machine designed to kill. It has one purpose: murder.”
H/T Reddit
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